Railway Poems 

( these poems are displayed at Vadodara Railway Museum as a part of Gallery on Railway and Popular culture)

Restaurant Car by Louis MacNeice

Fondling only to throttle the nuzzling moment
Smuggled under the table, hungry or not
We roughride over the sleepers, finger the menu,
Avoid our neighbours' eyes and wonder what

Mad country moves beyond the steamed-up window
So fast into the past we could not keep
Our feet on it one instant. Soup or grapefruit?
We had better eat to pass the time, then sleep

To pass the time. The water in the carafe
Shakes its hips, both glass and soup plate spill,
The tomtom beats in the skull, the waiters totter
Along their invisible tightrope. For good or ill,

For fish or meat, with single tickets only,
Our journey still in the nature of a surprise,
Could we, before we stop where all must change,
Take one first risk and catch our neighbours' eyes?

Night Mail 

Mail crossing the bordThis is the Night Mer,

 Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

 Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,

 The shop at the corner and the girl next door.

 Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:

 The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

 Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder

 Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

 Snorting noisily as she passes

 Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

 Birds turn their heads as she approaches,

 Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

 Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;

 They slumber on with paws across.

 In the farm she passes no one wakes,

 But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

 Dawn freshens, the climb is done.

 Down towards Glasgow she descends

 Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,

 Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces

 Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.

 All Scotland waits for her:

 In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs

 Men long for news.

 Letters of thanks, letters from banks,

 Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,

 Receipted bills and invitations

 To inspect new stock or visit relations,

 And applications for situations

 And timid lovers' declarations

 And gossip, gossip from all the nations,

 News circumstantial, news financial,

 Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,

 Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,

 Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,

 Letters to Scotland from the South of France,

 Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands

 Notes from overseas to Hebrides

 Written on paper of every hue,

 The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,

 The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,

 The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,

 Clever, stupid, short and long,

 The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

 Thousands are still asleep

 Dreaming of terrifying monsters,

 Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:

 Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,

 Asleep in granite Aberdeen,

 They continue their dreams,

 And shall wake soon and long for letters,

 And none will hear the postman's knock 

Without a quickening of the heart,

 For who can bear to feel himself forgotten

W.H. Auden